The 4th Thailand Biennale, sited across the island of Phuket, opened in November 2025 under artistic directors Arin Rungjang and David Teh, with curators Hera Chan and Marisa Phandharakrajadej, and runs through April 2026.
The Thailand Biennale is Thailand's state biennial of contemporary art, organised by the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (OCAC) under the Ministry of Culture and structured, since its founding in 2018, as a rotating-province exhibition. Each edition is sited in a different Thai province, programmed in partnership with the provincial government, and presented across outdoor and public-space locations as well as adapted indoor sites — a deliberate institutional argument that the biennial's curatorial conversation should also be a national-development conversation about cultural tourism, regional infrastructure and the relationship between contemporary art-making and the specific landscapes of Thailand. Four editions in, the rotating-province structure has produced exhibitions at four very different scales: Krabi's karst coastline (2018), Korat's plateau (2021), Chiang Rai's Golden Triangle (2023) and now Phuket's island geography (2025).
The 4th edition, Eternal [Kalpa], opened in November 2025 across Phuket under artistic directors Arin Rungjang and David Teh — the artist (b. 1975, Bangkok), a Documenta 14 and 55th Venice Biennale participant who co-founded the As Yet Unnamed collective; and the critic and Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore who has held curatorial roles at biennials in Europe, Australia and Asia — with curators Hera Chan (Adjunct Curator, Asia-Pacific, at Tate Modern) and Marisa Phandharakrajadej (lecturer at the School of Architecture, Art and Design, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang). The exhibition opened on 29 November 2025 and runs through 30 April 2026, gathering some sixty-five artists and collectives from twenty-five countries across nineteen venues and SALA pavilions in three districts of the island — Mueang, Kathu and Thalang. The Sanskrit-derived title takes kalpa — the long Buddhist cosmological epoch — as its working frame: the curatorial premise is that the sustainable relationship between humans and nature is best understood at geological and cosmological rather than political scales, and the exhibition takes Phuket's island ecology and coastal infrastructure as its working sites.
The rotating-province argument
The Thailand Biennale's distinguishing institutional feature is its rotation. Each edition is hosted by a different Thai province, and the curatorial commission is correspondingly site-specific: the inaugural Krabi 2018 edition, Edge of the Wonderland, was curated by Birmingham-based Professor Jiang Jiehong with fifty participating artists, deliberately staged outdoors to engage Krabi's karst landscape and local communities; the second, Korat 2021 — Butterflies Frolicking on the Mud: Engendering Sensible Capital — was directed by the Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa from 18 December 2021 to 31 March 2022, with fifty-four artists from twenty-six countries and a curatorial frame drawn from a 2020-2021 butterfly outbreak that Hasegawa read as a register of pandemic-era ecological recovery; the third, Chiang Rai 2023 — The Open World — was the first edition with a local artistic-direction team, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong, with curators Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram and sixty artists from twenty-one countries, sited across seventeen venues spanning Chiang Rai city and Chiang Saen district from 9 December 2023 to 30 April 2024. The Phuket 4th, again under a Thai-led artistic direction, continues that pattern.
The institutional question the biennial has continued to address — under each rotating-province administration — is the relationship between OCAC's national curatorial argument and the provincial cultural-tourism programme that part-funds the edition. The structure is, by intent, a hybrid: a state contemporary biennial that is also a cultural-tourism development instrument; a curatorial conversation that is also a national-infrastructure conversation. Each edition has produced a different curatorial reading of that hybrid.
